The Bend Chamber of Commerce is organizing the first-ever Bend Young Professional Summit, scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 29th. The summit gives professionals ages 21 through 40 the opportunity to network, share ideas and get involved with the community.
The StartupBend inbox has been overflowing with all sorts of interesting tidbits so we decided to round them all up into one delicious soup of news. Who wants news soup? Sorry no soup for you. Just kidding. Spend a few minutes getting caught up and penciling things into your calendar.
For the third year, I’ve been lucky enough to help facilitate one of the community salon discussions for the upcoming Muse Women’s Conference. This year we are talking with women who have reinvented themselves — how they did it, their challenges and the unexpected outcomes.
You might have seen Bend’s Matthew Gregory pitch his idea for a blockchain-based startup that creates a registry for IoT devices during the runup to the Bend Venture Conference. Well, while the rest of us have been reading Buzzfeed and eating Christmas cookies (OK just me), Matt has been readying to launch his startup, Ockam.
While most of us think about self-driving cars as something we might acquire in the far-off future, Mark Silliman, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tend.ai, has been driving (riding?) one around town for the past couple of months.
Bend’s own Rita Hansen, head of OnBoard Dynamics, has been selected to be part of a delegation of U.S. entrepreneurs, investors and more headed to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at the end of this month. The eighth annual summit with take place in Hyderabad, India, and highlight the theme Women First, Prosperity for All–focusing on supporting women entrepreneurs and economic growth.
People: We’re a week out from the BendTECH unConference and I wanted to make sure you all are aware of some of the new additions and changes to this year’s event, which is a fun and fast pitchfest for entrepreneurs and startup founders. First and foremost, thanks to our amazing sponsors — Kollective, City of Bend, Associated Technologies Council and 1001 Tech Space — we are offering cash and other prizes to the winning pitches.
Yesterday we announced that Ignite TAO is presenting 11 tech talks at an event later this month. Some of you noticed that of the 11 speakers, only two are women. As one StartupBend reader and growth strategist/public speaker Kristin Luck put it in a tweet, that’s “not awesome.”